Description

An artist who painted narratives about fellow African Americans, Jacob Lawrence chafed when called a social realist. Yet, in his numerous depictions of slavery, struggle, Harlem streets, libraries, and construction workers he clearly had an agenda. He viewed ignorance and inactivity as other forms of slavery. In a panel discussion with poet Maya Angelou at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in 1981, he explained his view of the African-American artist: “We hope to probe, to touch a certain nerve, a certain tension. We continue to look, to observe, to experience that this will show in our work. As to the obligation to maintain a certain integrity—I think we [ethnic artists] are put under a tremendous burden.” [1]

In Builders No. 2, three men are busy in a workshop cluttered with tools. The overall composition has a “certain tension.” Flat shapes, such as the central two-by-four and the denim pant legs of the foreground figures, reinforce the vertical format. The interacting diagonals of the worktable—a highlighted plank of wood, the left arm of the worker on the left, and the leg of the worker on the right—are all carefully balanced. The elevated viewpoint complements the tilted perspective, which makes tools appear as if they are floating. Painted with gouache and tempera over a graphite underdrawing, the colors are bright, but also matte, and manage to set off the flat, inscribed shapes. There is no apparent light source, and, as a result, very little modeling.

Lawrence painted scenes of construction workers as early as 1946, and revisited the theme many times over the next five decades. Like a lot of his subjects, the concept was rooted in a memory of his childhood: “When I was fifteen or sixteen, I was exposed to the workshop of these three brothers in Harlem, cabinetmakers. I got to know them and they got to know me. For me, tools became extensions of hands and movement.” [2] In Builders No. 2, the visual play between hands and tools energizes the composition; three hands are silhouetted against the bright yellow plank, and a frieze of tools runs across the top, while another set trails down the central axis. The hands are large and muscular—not unlike those of the artist who, like the builders, crafted things with his hands. These distortions, along with the compressed space, have earned Lawrence the moniker “expressive cubist.”

During the late 1960s, Lawrence showed renewed interest in his paintings of carpenters and construction workers, reflecting in part the socio-political tenor of the day. Opposition to the Vietnam War was eclipsing the fervor of the Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, followed by urban riots, were low points in American history. In paintings like Builders No. 2, he portrayed building as a communal activity and appealed for racial harmony, while at the same time reminding everyone that African Americans make significant contributions to American society. Despite the apparent stalemate in race relations, his position was one of optimism: “I like the symbolism of the [builder]. … I think of it as man’s aspiration, as a constructive tool.” [3]

Notes:
[1] Lawrence, panel discussion March 24, 1981, transcript, archives, Reynolda House Museum of American Art.
[2] Lawrence, interview with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, April 12, 1996.
[3] Lawrence, quoted in Lowery Stokes Sims, “The Structure of Narrative: Form and Content in Jacob Lawrence’s Builders Paintings, 1946–1998,” in Peter T. Nesbitt, ed. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000), 209.

Artist Bio

A great storyteller, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) once claimed in an interview, “Form is just as important as content.” The stories he painted were about the history of blacks in America and the African-American experience. He rendered them in a uniquely personal style that has been called “expressive cubism.” [1]

Despite the fact that he was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence is intimately associated with Harlem, where his family moved in 1930. His art education began early with Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop, sponsored at first by the College Art Association and then the Works Progress Administration. For eighteen months, he was affiliated with the easel program of the WPA Federal Art Project. Even though the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance had passed, Lawrence was exposed to a community of artists and writers who celebrated the accomplishments of African Americans. Precocious, he painted at the age of twenty the first of his slave histories, which focused on the Haitian revolutionary figure Toussaint L’Ouverture. Others in the series deal with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Lawrence carefully researched their life stories, which he illustrated in small tempera paintings bearing captions of his own devising. In 1940, he presented a more contemporary theme, the twentieth-century migration of blacks from the South to the North.

Success came early to Lawrence; the Toussaint paintings were exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1938; he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940, which was renewed the following year; and he was the first African American to have a one-man exhibition at a major New York gallery, the Downtown Gallery, in 1941. During World War II, he served in the United States Coast Guard and was stationed in St. Augustine and Boston before tours to Europe, the Near East, and India. Following his discharge, Lawrence taught one summer at the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Josef Albers headed the art department and became his mentor.

With his wife, the painter Gwendolyn Knight, he lived first in Brooklyn, and then on the fringes of Harlem. Many awards and artist-in-residencies came his way, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and teaching at Brandeis University, the Art Students League, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine for six summers. He undertook commissions for Fortune and Time magazines. During the 1970s, he taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, which induced him to break ties with New York.

Over his long and productive career, Lawrence returned repeatedly to themes of struggle, learning, building, and community. His two-dimensional figures were largely African Americans, portrayed simply but heroically, and typically painted with tempera paints or gouache. His style employs such Cubist-derived devices as tilted space, distorted proportions, and emphatic juxtapositions of color. For him, both form and content draw from the same source. In his acceptance speech for an award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lawrence declared modestly: “If I have achieved a degree of success as a creative artist, it is mainly due to the black experience which is our heritage—an experience which gives inspiration, motivation, and stimulation. I was inspired by the black aesthetic by which we are surrounded, motivated to manipulate form, color, space, line and texture to depict our life, and stimulated by the beauty and poignancy of our environment. We do not forget…that encouragement which came from the black community.” [2]

Nesbitt, Peter T. ed. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Nesbitt, Peter T., and Patricia Hills. Jacob Lawrence: Thirty Years of Prints (1963–1993): A Catalogue Raisonné. Seattle, WA: Francine Seders Gallery in association with the University of Washington Press, 1994.

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938–1940. Exhibition catalogue. Hampton, VA, and Seattle, WA: Hampton University in association with the University of Washington Press, 1991.